The wildfire situation in Northwestern Ontario has drawn growing global attention. There have been extraordinary stories of close calls and narrow escapes from the rapidly advancing fires. Complaints are coming (ironically) from the United States over the impacts of the resulting fire smoke on American cities.
In the short term, attention has rightly focused on the immediate responses to the fires. The Ontario and federal governments were slow to recognize the scale and significance of the fires, and the threats they posed to Northern communities. The efforts of local officials to respond to the emergency have been praised, but many communities have expressed feelings of abandonment by the province and Ottawa, both in terms of the lack of warnings and inadequate responses.
At the same time, the fires need to be viewed in a longer-term context. Increased incidences of large-scale forest fires, particularly in the boreal region stretching across Canada from Labrador to the Yukon, have been a predicted impact of climate change in Canada for more than three decades.
Major forest fires have become a defining feature of Canadian summers over the past decade. The immediate impacts are severe enough—smoke blanketing large parts of the continent, the loss of communities and homes, and people finding themselves in life-threatening danger.
The fires also represent an important negative feedback loop for the climate. The fires are major sources of GHGs themselves, but more seriously they also signify the ongoing destruction of forests and wetlands in Canada’s boreal region, and, crucially, of the region’s function as a global scale site for carbon sequestration and storage.
All of this is a product of a larger failure—that of Canadian governments to effectively respond to the threat of climate change before the predicted impacts moved from the realm of modelling and projection into lived reality.
In the case of Ontario, the province had actually made some significant progress on reducing its GHG emissions. The phase-out of coal-fired electricity generation between 2003 and 2013 is widely regarded as the most significant achievement to date among governments in North America to reduce emissions. The province adopted a relatively comprehensive climate change action plan in 2017. That plan included participation in a continent-leading carbon pricing and emission reduction system with Quebec and California.
Then came Doug Ford. On its arrival in June 2018, the Ford government moved immediately to dismantle the previous government’s climate plan, including participation in the Québec-California emissions cap-and-trade system. All of the programs, including public transit expansion, building energy efficiency retrofits, and support for the adoption of electric vehicles that would have been funded through the $1 billion per year generated through the program, were cancelled.
Those directions continued with the infamous termination of the province’s efforts at renewable energy development, including the cancellation of 743 contracted projects, and the literal pulling of completed wind turbine projects out of the ground. That marked a halt in renewable energy development in the province that lasted until this year, while the rest of the world accelerated ahead. The province’s strategy for improving energy efficiency and energy productivity was also cancelled, on the basis that it was too successful and had achieved its targets early.
The assault on the province’s capacity to address the climate crisis didn’t stop there. The Ford government has since then embarked on a systemic purge of any reference to climate change targets from its planning policies. Efforts by local governments to address the challenge by adopting green building standards and other measures have been actively blocked by provincial legislation. The Ontario Energy Board has even proposed removing consideration of the benefits of GHG emissions reductions from its assessments of utility energy efficiency programs.
Having dismantled virtually all of the province’s policies around climate change, the Ford government explicitly abandoned its GHG reduction targets and plans in its November 2025 economic statement.
Unsurprisingly, the province’s GHG emission performance is deteriorating. In 2017, gas-fired generation accounted for four percent of the province’s electricity supply. Now it accounts for nearly 20 percent of supply and is projected to continue to grow through the 2030s. The province’s overall GHG emissions, which fell as a result of the coal phaseout and the COVID-19 pandemic, are beginning to rise again.
The province’s overwhelmingly nuclear– and gas-focused energy plans are poised to push both emissions and costs higher, further undermining decarbonization efforts, as well as competitiveness and affordability.
In this context, this summer’s fires appear as a capstone on a portrait of policy failure. They make it clear that ignoring a problem that is rooted in biophysical reality, and trying to legislate it out of existence, doesn’t work.
Ontario’s role within Canada makes it capable of reconfiguring the direction of national climate policy. This summer’s wildfires are a signal that it needs to do that. The province needs to both adapt to the reality of a changing climate and its consequences, and develop a serious strategy for not making the problem worse. So far, Ontario is failing on both fronts.
Mark Winfield is a professor of environmental and urban change at York University. He has written extensively on energy, climate and electricity issues in Ontario. He is co-editor of Sustainable Energy Transitions in Canada (UBC Press, 2023).